It's most mysterious, and I'm hesitant to reformat because since I don't know WHY this happened, it could happen again.

I had just installed Easy CD Creator 5, and an odd assortment of smaller misc programs, mainly shell extentions. My Task Bar quit showing the minimized programs. I can see them in Control Alt/Delete, and get them to show if I cascade or tile the windows, but they appear ONLY on the screen, still not in the task bar.

I already tried removing the reference to the task bar in the registry as per Mosiac1. Did that twice.

I also tried deleting that reference, shutting off Windows Explorer and then immediately reinstalling Windows from RUN.

Still the same. What kind of a shell extention would do that? I checked out Roxios site, not one mere mention of a Task Bar problem, site wide.